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Paper Dolls

For the last ten months or so, ever since Cavebabe was given the all clear from her urinary infection and brought back from a strip-lit, candy-toned hospital ward to a muddle of unwashed clothes and sibling rivalry, my greatest struggles with parenting have taken place on the inside.

Apart from dealing with a run of ill health that I am still trying to get over, I have been periodically assaulted by waves of anger, irritability, frustration, grief, loneliness, disappointment in myself, and guilt – as well as probably a few other feelings as yet unspecified in our language, so poor as it is in emotional vocabulary.

Where these feelings came from I puzzled over constantly, fruitlessly. A hormonal release catalysed by the shock of the hospital adventure? The burden of carrying two children under the leaky umbrella of an ill-functioning marriage? Toxins being dredged out of old fat cells now being steadily worked through by my breastmilk-guzzling babe?

The mind fumbling around in the lucky dip of life as it tends to do, I would think I’d ‘got it’, found the trick, the remedy, the therapeutic technique that would stop all this illness nonsense and return me from gabbling emotional wreck to sane, grounded specimen of humankind as (I thought) I always was.

Hah! Not so easy, as the blind men feeling the elephant’s trunk, leg and buttock – and each believing it was a snake, a tree and a rock – so amply prove. (Thanks, blind mythological men. You’re a great help sometimes.)

But this evening, that wave crashing over me, usually so dense and white with its own violent force, became transparent as air, and the thoughts that carried it forward suddenly stood out in its luminous arc like fish. It was so clear that’s what this wave was: a response to a thought, nothing more.

I went to my notebook and wrote out these thoughts, to see them even more starkly naked, exposed, caught red-handed in their crime. Phrases like ‘I am not creating a nurturing enough atmosphere for my family’ or ‘Caveman does not value me’ fell limp and artificial to the page in front of me.

Who cared if they were true or not? It was the thinking them that tortured me, filled my head with ‘if only’s, turned my heart into a battlefield between me and reality. I was scrabbling about on the peripheries of my being, looking for answers on Google when I had the right remedy closer to me than my jugular vein. “The heavens and the earth cannot contain Me, but the hearts of the believers do.”

All the therapies in the world cannot cure a heart of its longing for Home. All the distractions in the world cannot numb its desire to be returned to its Source.

So this is my medicine now, my panacea for all ills; come back to my core, the nucleus of my matter, the truth of what kindles life in me. Tonight that meant digging out a book about Sufism (The Camel on the Roof by Burhanuddin Hermann), and sitting alone reciting Quran, only understanding flashes here and there but relishing the sounds as they convulsed my throat and chest and mouth (al-yawmu tashshaqqaq al-ard – ah! Sublime) and being flooded once more with that familiar, indescribable beauty that renders all my imagination’s hobbies paper dolls.

That is how it feels to remember. And that is my favourite cure: to be true, to be true, to be true.

Yes, that truly must be the cosmic reason why there is so much nuttiness in the world…it’s all a process as I’m (painfully slowly) learning…there’s never an end product to attain, a state that won’t change.

Hi, have just stopped by, came from the So Resourceful blog, as i’ve had a nosey and think your blog is brilliant i just thought it would be rude not to leave a comment while i was here 🙂
Have added your blog to my blog roll, hope you don’t mind, Jo x

Hi and thanks Jo! I am always chuffed to bits when people stop by who aren’t coerced to do so when I see them in the streets and prod them with sharpened pencils. I’m very happy to be added to your blogroll, I will have a nosey of your blog too, what’s the URL? All the best x

Medina,
It has been ages since I have been online and done any blog reading for reasons that are extremely similar to those you describe so eloquently. I am so glad that you do find the time to write and I am doubly glad that I just happened to read your words that remind me that I am not as alone as I occasionally (ha! often) feel.

I’m so glad it’s been of some solace Iman! God knows we run the gauntlet while parenting…god to know we are all in the same boat when it comes down to it. Love and salams to you and strength in your mothering journey. xxx

I thought I’d pop along to your blog, just to see what you’re up to these days, and I stumbled across this post. Just wanted to say thank you so much for sharing – your honesty and humility are both comforting and inspiring. For whatever reasons, we all at some point feel despair, loneliness, frustration… or just plain “stuck in a rut”. It takes courage and sensitivity to share these experiences with others, but in doing so, you offer us compassion and hope… perhaps that is the point of all of this?